Week 43: Portrait Elderly

October 27, 2016 – First of all, calling someone–of any age–elderly, rubs me seriously wrong. This week’s prompt Portrait Elderly, aggravated me. Who would I call elderly? No one!! The older I get, the more I’m offended by the word. I can’t imagine I’ll ever feel elderly, let alone want to be called elderly.

My aversion to the term started last year while covering a home invasion robbery. The in-house writer (some twenty-something) called the couple victimized by the robbers elderly. They were in their fifties. Fifty is not elderly. When I get to seventy, I’m sure I’ll say seventy is not elderly. All relative, right? Or maybe it’s just me.

Regardless, as I’m sure you can tell, I’m bothered by the label, so instead of a face, here’s a different kind of picture for Portrait Elderly.

Week 43: Portrait Elderly

Tell the story of an elderly person through the power of your camera.

Capture the lines of their life.

As luck had it, the perfect opportunity for the prompt came up this week when assigned to cover a reunion of Pearl Harbor survivors. Talk about stories! What these men experienced seventy-five years ago… Wow. Some still couldn’t talk about it to this day. The eleven men attending this event were all in their nineties, so yeah, technically elderly, but still so full of life. My first priority was to shoot video for our news segment, but I did manage to sneak in a few shots.

During my career, I’ve covered many events involving WWII vets, and every time I’m thankful to meet them. Inside, these men are still the boys who went off to war. You can see it in their eyes and in their smiles. There is nothing elderly about them.

Okay, okay, you get the point. Moving on. If you’d like to see the news segment, here it is.

I still need my Landscape High from week 41. I’d planned to do a cool overview shot at Babes Ride Out, but they rearranged camp this year and the shot didn’t exist. Dang it! The weekend was a BLAST, by the way. I’ll write about it over on the Motor Dolls blog… soon. Until next week’s Landscape Tree …